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Map of tonnage on highways, railroads and inland waterways in 2002, from the Warehouse Workers for Justice report “Bad Jobs in Goods Movement.”

The recent Walmart strikes — beginning first among warehouse workers in California, then spreading to others in Elwood, Illinois, and finally to Walmart retail stores across the United States — raise the possibility that workers may be able to crack the anti-union wall at the country’s largest employer. The new momentum seems likely to spread among many more workplaces to come. But these wildcat strikes are a reminder that, if American workers are to have a better-organized future, they will have to better understand where their corporate opponents are vulnerable.

The Walmart strikes are part of a significant reevaluation of organizing strategy by labor unions and activists in the context of the continuing decline of unionism in the United States — where fewer than 7 percent of workers in the private sector belong to a union. As Nadine Bloch pointed out two weeks ago, such wildcat strikes on multiple levels of the supply chain at Walmart are unprecedented, and groups like OUR Walmart and Warehouse Workers for Justice are planning to escalate the campaign in the coming weeks.

Over the past three decades, there has been a tremendous shift in the work lives of almost everyone in the United States wrought by processes of globalization. With the deregulation of trade in favor of multinational corporations (exemplified in trade deals such as NAFTA), and the emergence of hyper-specialization, most major commodities are now produced with components manufactured all over the world, selected through a competitive bidding process that aims to extract the maximum profit.

Few have expressed this brave new world better than former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, when he said to Lou Dobbs in 1998, “Ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge.” The 1 percent, that is, could move the points of production at a whim to wherever the cost of labor was cheapest and the regulatory environment was weakest.

Walmart led the retail industry’s embrace of this system, though most other retailers now follow the post-globalization model as well. In the past, most retail operations would take place at regional or national population centers, with considerably higher transit costs that made local and higher-priced labor a necessity. But with the increasing automation of ports — as well as the deregulation of containerization in 1984 and of the trucking industry at the end of the 1970s — the global and national supply chain transit costs have been reduced. The increasing mobility of production and distribution has spelled disaster for the once-powerful trade unions. Rather than relying on a stable pool of labor, the key to Walmart’s success has been getting low-cost goods to customers at precisely the right moment according to microanalysis of market patterns. But that is also what makes it so vulnerable to work stoppages.

Workers at key points in the supply chain can create massive disruptions in the process. A report conducted in 2002 found that a West Coast longshoremen lockout cost the U.S. economy $2 billion daily. And, in the recent strike of just two dozen subcontracted Walmart warehouse workers in Elwood, Illinois, the strikers heard reports from allies at Walmart retail stores in the region that there were already shortages of goods. This occurred less than 10 days into the strike, Elwood warehouse worker Mike Compton told me.

By focusing on key links in the supply chain, and by using a strike at the beginning of an organizing campaign instead of at the end, Walmart workers are not only taking advantage of the company’s 21st-century weaknesses. They’re also harkening back to an earlier form of union organization, which was far more common prior to the passage of the Wagner Act of 1935.

The Wagner Act established a form of union organizing through secret-ballot elections and contract negotiations that has been the method by which most unions since then have organized. After its passage, wildcat strikes dramatically decreased. But with the decimation of the National Labor Relations Board under the Reagan administration and an ever-decreasing share of union workers in the private sector, groups like the Change to Win Federation — made up of four major labor unions — and the small, militant United Electrical Workers union are now backing worker centers with new strategies. Their primary focus is, first, improving working conditions on the ground; formal union recognition can then occur after such basics as permanent employment and freedom from retaliation are established.

Wildcatting certainly brings more aggressive tactics to the fore once again, but with the ever-increasing automation of most skilled tasks in the workplace and with more and more unemployed workers available to take the place of strikers, a traditional wildcat strike has little likelihood of success in many cases. Factories can be moved if the supply system is still intact, and low-skill retail workers are usually easy for management to replace, at least temporarily.

But at certain vital points in the global movement of commodities, organizers are seeing new opportunities. The magazine Labor Notes, for instance, has been analyzing the trends taking place on the supply chain and the global organization of labor for the past two decades.

“Here we have a company, Walmart, that’s not producing anything, but is selling things,” says Jane Slaughter, its co-founder and co-editor. “Walmart is the master of lean supply, they are known for squeezing every cent out of their suppliers. Walmart depends on daily deliveries, and if workers can throw a monkey wrench in that, it will cause them significant problems.”

The Chicago area is the only place in North America where six Class I railroads meet. Warehouses, distribution centers, container storage locations and intermodal facilities dot the landscape. The strategic node of transportation that exists in the greater Chicago area, dubbed the “Midwest Empire,” is a crucial link in the intermodal movement of goods in the United States.

The Elwood facility, owned by the company RoadLink, processes a staggering 70 percent of Walmart’s domestic goods, and the strike there has radically altered the balance of power in the workplace. Mike Compton, a former striker who is now back at work in the warehouse told me about the new climate of the warehouse. “Managers are being overly nice,” he said.

We ask for safety equipment, they get us safety equipment — shin guards, masks, gloves. They do seem a little scared to have us as a group. We’ve forced meetings on them. We’ve been using the Weingarten Rights [by which a union member has a right to have a union official or steward with them at any meeting or hearing that could potentially lead to discipline], whether or not it’s disciplinary.

That the two-dozen workers were able to get back to work after their time on strike — with full back-pay — is a far cry from most labor organizing campaigns, in which there is a one-in-three chance that an employer will retaliate by firing, and in which there are usually rampant threats and interrogations leading up to an election. But in Elwood managers seem to be terrified.

The importance of this link on the Walmart supply chain was indicated quite clearly by the response of the state of Illinois to a protest by Warehouse Workers for Justice and its community allies: police in riot gear, along with threats of deploying long-range acoustic devices and projectiles. The fact that a small minority of workers at a warehouse were able to cause such fear from management leads one to think that such links in the supply chain are just as tenuous as labor researchers have thought them to be.

The first strike of this autumn of discontent was among warehouse workers in Mira Loma, and workers went back to work with safety improvements. But the significant victory in Elwood — caused in part by its key location on the supply chain — now gives Walmart workers across the country a real and concrete victory to point to and to work from as they escalate toward a national day of protest on Black Friday.

In the latter half of the 20th century, it was almost axiomatic among theorists of industry that a low-wage, unsafe and high-turnover model of production would come at the expense of industrial peace. But for decades Walmart has escaped that danger through rampant outsourcing and a global supply chain that divides workers across the country and the world. As exploited workers are stepping up their tactics, the company’s lavishly-paid executives and consultants are probably beginning to rethink their ways of operating as well.

I worked a short time ( just over one yr) at Walmart # 0603 in Pekin, Illinois. I had gotten laid off from a union job of 26 1/2 yrs. The salary I made at Walmart was about what I started at in my union job. Walmart hired me part time 32 hr just so I couldn’t qualify for the health ins they offered to Full Time associates ONLY. You work like a robot at Walmart and you never get finished since they move you on to another area to work/stock. Oh, I was a 3rd shift stocker basically.

Cage Aaron Walmart has used its monopoly to put small businesses under, lower wages in the US, squeeze its suppliers (some have gone out of business), move manufacturing jobs over seas. Walmart is too big and should be broken up

Donna Waggoner-Carter How much money do people need anyway? All of it?? Jeez! Let’s have a Walmart Blackout! No shopping at Walmart for one day… NO ONE can buy anything there on (pick a day)… They might get a message if you hit ’em where they live! Their wallet! =)

Annie Clark I suggest that more folks participate in “Buy Nothing Day”, something that has been going on for years.
When is it? Why, on “Black Friday”!, of course. Join in & make a difference!
Also, the day AFTER that (Sat. after Thanksgiving) is now the day to support small & local businesses. Help your neighbors, shop local.

Newell Bies Never shop at walmart. These wonderful walmart employee’s would be working at the locally owned shops if we would ALL just spend our money at the locally owned shops. Shop at your local grocery!

Brian Shelton How can a publicly traded company please it’s workers, share holders, consumers, and venders? It makes no since. The workers pay to work there basically!

Leif Brecke Our organizing principle is dispersed swarming, utilizing affinity groups and clusters of affinity groups. Our goal is to attack critical nodes to create cascading failure in the Walmart distribution network.
Our current tasks: to map critical nodes in the Walmart distribution network and to form Walmart General Strike Committees.
Also, here are the Walmart Distribution Centers: http://www.algulfcoastvideo.com/area54.htm

Branden Baker So, Mr. Brecke, would I be correct to say that the swarm-like approach is akin in methodology to a class action law suit; where a general strike is more antiquated method, but holds resemblance to marches to put hard power pressure on legislatures to enact a broad net like protection over a demographic? Or is there some more distended and nuanced method by which swarm tactics are used to enact social change?
As for the warehouseworkers.org study; I believe that to make legislative protctions, and foster the native labor stregnth of the region on a government level, the economic argument needs to be stressed- and I did not feel persuaded (as a politician) to support action.

I am so Proud of all of you!!! Right On! I don’t work there, but I will stand with beside you all. Keep up the good fight.
we had those Rights once,& you can get them back. Labor Laws, stop the “Loop Holes”= Temp jobs=BS!! Cheating the workers at every pt. Time to take back our Rights! Decent salaries,full benefits, vacation time, sick days, raises reg., all the rights we had as Unions..

Wow… To paint your employer as your “opponent”… Ridiculous. This type of ridiculous banter is disgusting. If you are working for a company and WANT to see it fail, I can’t help but feel sorry for you and your worthless life.

Being someones slave is more disgusting!!!Cheating these workers out of the profits they have earned is disgusting!! Too cheap to make their working conditions safe, that is disgusting. Encouraging slavery within your delivery trucks is disgusting. Bullying small towns is disgusting. They are the “opponent” big time!

I do not even know the way I finished up here, however I thought this put up used to be good. I don’t understand who you might be however certainly you’re going to a well-known blogger should you aren’t already. Cheers!

The likely outcome of a serious supply disruption to Wal-Mart on a key retail day like Black Friday, or continued problems throughout the rest of the year, would be to shift business to another (probably non-union) retailer like Target.

Fear mongors, here they come…your gonna cost us our jobs, no your not! lIES, They will have to go Union, just pass out the “Cards” get them signed, Unionized is that simple. Team work is all it takes. Too many of you, you have the Power which is why their paying commentators to come on here, spreading their propaganda. I am so Proud of all of you..I will stand beside you all.

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